René Girard's Social Media
Shmoop eavesdrops on your favorite critic's online convos.
Just reread your book Violence and the Sacred. Over 40 years old, and the book still has legs to stand on. I have great affection for my dog-eared, yellowing first edition. The inscription inside—"Take it from me, G, nihilism will get you nowhere fast"—still warms my heart. I know it came from the right place.
There's a lot to your anthropological theories, so I remain humbled by your wealth of knowledge, even as I borrow very liberally from your ideas.
Glad to hear, glad to hear.
Hey, René, you and I could hardly be more distant from one another on the ideological divide, but that doesn't mean we can't be on a panel together. Or does it?
No hard feelings, man. Just because you think everything is a conspiracy doesn't mean that everything is not a conspiracy. We can agree to disagree on the importance of mimesis in language acquisition.
I guess so. I mean, language is passed down to offspring via genetics. But we can respect our differences.
Absolutely. It does not matter at all that you fail to see scapegoating as the source of language. Doesn't matter one bit.
Nor does it matter to me! It's totally cool that you overlook scientific evidence and use myth to account for biological human functions.
And I'm amused that you believe in universal violence and not universal grammar. Tee hee.
Anyone up for a little pew time?
Yes, I did hear that you were spreading those vile untruths. I actually talked to The Man the day before yesterday, and he seemed like he was hanging in there.
No. So sorry, but I've said it before, and I'll say again, "God is dead. God remains dead."
Wow. Weird. Did you hear me? I just said that God left a message for you. It was, "Call me!"
If I may step in here... Look, I like both of you. Equally. Fred, if you could lighten up on the bad news, and, René, if you step off on the whole evangelical bit, that would be cool.
I'll do it for you, Jacques. But I know no one thinks I'm cool. They don't see that I'm living proof that you can be avant-garde and Christian at the same time.
So pleased to hear that the book still rocks your world. People accuse me of being politically incorrect, so it's always a relief to hear that I still have a few friends—er, sympathetic readers.